How Cyber Weapons Are Changing the
Landscape of Modern Warfare
This
is a reflexive critical reflection Sue Halpern’s above-entitled New Yorker article. This is an
attempt to expand upon the given topic. It seems very obvious to me that an
offensive cyber weapon would rarely be used in a military scenario – unless
those deploying it where willing to risk the repercussions. However, as I’d
suggested in class (10.09.2023) a cyber attack could be fielded by a
self-interested third party e.g., PMC, etc. Given the low cost of programmers, deniability
to the Nth degree (who contracted who for what) and means of obfuscation contract
employees presents themselves as a potentially viable means for conducting
(and/or further) an asymmetrical cyber campaign.
It wasn’t difficult finding an article to seed this brief essay either, cyber-attacks
aren’t rare. I’ll make a minor modification in the end goal being indicated
which will seem sensible once it’s reviewed. Nate Jones covered a patient Chinese hacking cadre willing to compromise a dozen telecomm companies for years just to collect metadata on as few as twenty
telecomm customers. Replace China with PMC (for lack of a better term for defining
mercenary) then consider this unknown crew operating with a singular purpose –
collection of an actionable data set. Necessary attributes of the data set
provided to programmer(s) would be passed from said contractors to an unknown
general contractor. The layers of the onion would be as deep as necessary for
the pieces of “the weapon” to be difficult to associate with any region in
particular, just ISO.
Thus if a contracted APT where to play a long game – like a strategic
state asset (not seeking an exploit) - and
managed to go undetected awaiting an execution command it could wreak havoc.
Ransomware gangs have demonstrated that it doesn’t, necessarily, require a
nation state actor to wage an offensive cyber campaign …
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